Revolutionism redux, Part III
The C.I.A. is revealed (again) as the revolutionary vanguard urging Nancy Pelosi on to impeachment — From The New Criterion of November, 2019
Entry from November 20, 2019
That the lawyer and commentator Joe diGenova is the latest critic of George Soros to be trashed as an anti-Semite on Twitter is yet another reminder, if one were needed, of the left’s grand project, ably abetted if not led by the media, to delegitimize all dissent from or opinion contrary to their own orthodoxy….
Revolutionism redux, part II
A New York Times town hall meeting reveals that paper’s newsroom as the epicenter of the revolutionary dynamic now manifesting itself among American progressives — From The New Criterion of October, 2019
Revolutionism Redux, Part I
On the perils of the modern revolutionary mindset — From The New Criterion of September, 2019
Entry from September 25, 2019
The first time I can remember coming across the idea was when, nearly 20 years ago now, I read the late Christopher Hitchens’s Letters to a Young Contrarian and was surprised by the author’s contempt for one of my own intellectual heroes, Blaise Pascal, for having proposed his famous "wager" in favor of belief in…
Entry from August 13, 2019
It used to be that ideological struggle was pretty straightforward. One lot of people had a theory about how the world works, and how it ought to work, which it sought to impose upon the world or some part of it either by democratic persuasion or by revolutionary force while another lot of people wishing…
Report from an alternative universe
What do they know of Media-land who only Media-land know? — From The New Criterion of June, 2019
Entry from June 25, 2019
Yesterday was a red-letter day. Yesterday I read what I have been waiting and hoping for years to read in a major media outlet. And not in just one such outlet but two, quite independently of each other! Here’s what Ryan Clancy, writing in The Wall Street Journal had to say: Many Americans have this…
Entry from June 11, 2019
If you’re going to write about the multiple tergiversations of Joe Biden over abortion, as I did last week, you’d better rush your copy into print as soon as possible lest it become outdated before anyone can read it. Within 24 hours of my noticing on Thursday his flip-flop-flip over the Hyde Amendment, Mr Biden…
Entry from June 6, 2019
My heart leaped up when I beheld the following headline in this morning’s (London) Daily Telegraph: "Michael Gove is too good to be our next Prime Minister" Here at last, I thought, I had found in the article’s author, Sarah Arnold, someone who shares my suspicion that good character is but a poor qualification for national…
Irony of Ironies
A parody of news coverage becomes self-parody and no one seems to notice — From The New Criterion of May, 2019
Entry from May 29, 2019
President Trump’s delegation of the power to declassify documents related to the origins of the Russian “collusion” story to Attorney General Barr has got the New York Times worried. What if, asked reporters Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, blundering Mr Barr endangers the CIA’s secret sources of information by revealing their identities? Though…